Capt. Ariel Armbrister, 23, serves as a search-and-rescue officer in the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command. Her family immigrated to Israel from the United States in 2019.
This week, ahead of the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, she spoke to JNS about her experience as an on-duty officer at the Zikim base near Gaza that day and the decisions she made as it came under attack.
Armbrister arrived at Zikim on Thurs., Oct. 5 for a routine weekend assignment, which involved being responsible for the soldiers remaining on base over Shabbat. It was a role, she said, that she had performed before without incident.
The following day, Oct. 6, felt like an ordinary Friday, and she accompanied her soldiers to the beach. That evening was the start of Simchat Torah holiday, which the soldiers celebrated before going to sleep. Armbrister says that she went to bed at around 3 a.m.
Just over three hours later, at 6:30, sirens began sounding. Armbrister and the other soldiers initially assumed it was another round of rocket fire from Gaza. But then, she says, they heard gunfire. That was the moment, she recalled, when she realized something was fundamentally different and knew that she needed to get to the base’s command center.
So she quickly donned her uniform, helmet and protective vest and headed there with other soldiers. As they drove, they heard shooting so intense that they were convinced their vehicle was under attack.
When they arrived at their destination, the base commander made a decision Armbrister believes was critical to preventing the base from being overrun: Commanders and officers would replace the new recruits at the guard posts, putting more experienced personnel on the perimeter. This was Armbrister’s introduction to what would come to be called the “Oct. 7 massacre.”
According to the IDF, seven soldiers were killed at the Zikim base that day and another nine wounded. Another soldier was killed during the Hamas infiltration at nearby Zikim beach, where Armbrister and the others had been the previous day.
‘The world was ending’
Inside the command center, the officers attempted to piece together what was happening, while trying to obtain assistance for the soldiers fighting outside.
Armbrister said that one of the hardest parts of that morning was having to project confidence.
Meanwhile, she recounts, radio communications from the soldiers outside became increasingly desperate. They were requesting reinforcements and ammunition, but the officers in the command center struggled to find help; calls to nearby bases revealed that they were also under attack.
Then came reports that soldiers protecting Zikim had been wounded. The soldiers inside the command center phoned Magen David Adom for ambulances, but were told that terrorists were flooding the roads, making it too dangerous to dispatch medical vehicles.
“I felt at that moment like the world was pretty much ending,” she recounted.
But then, Armbrister added, came the report that terrorists had infiltrated the base. She locked down the command center until the terrorists inside the base were neutralized, after which everyone gathered in the cafeteria.
Later, another barrage of rockets sent roughly 90 soldiers into a large bomb shelter, where they would remain for about 15 hours with little communication, as cellphone reception and electricity failed.
By then, Armbrister said, the scope of her mission had narrowed: “I just needed to function. That was my goal.”
‘I don’t know where that courage came from’
As the hours passed, Armbrister recounted, the soldiers guarding the base became exhausted. Someone had to replace them, but most of the new recruits were unwilling to leave the shelter. So she volunteered, grabbing a rifle from one of the recruits who had suffered a panic attack.
Since she hadn’t fired such a weapon in approximately a year, she was forced to reacquaint herself with it.
“I don’t know where that courage came from,” she says, adding that as soon as she stepped outside, she questioned her decision.
“What the hell are you doing, Ariel?” she remembers asking herself. “Do you want to die?”
With new recruits following her, however, she says she felt she couldn’t turn back. Eventually, she returned to the shelter, but later volunteered for another guard position just outside the structure. She remained there until exhaustion caused her to request that someone replace her. She had been awake for nearly 24 hours straight.
She remembers falling asleep on the floor of the shelter before being woken up by a senior commander who entered with news that two buses had arrived to evacuate the soldiers. They rushed aboard and began the journey out of Zikim.
As they reached the roads outside the base, Armbrister said she saw the devastation left behind by the attack. The images, she stressed, remain with her.
“There are people who look away, and then there are the ones who can’t stop looking. I’m the kind who has to look, and memory of what I saw will be there forever,” she said.
‘My true home is here in Israel’
A few days after the attack, an officer suggested that Armbrister take advantage of her American citizenship and return to the United States. This, she says, isn’t an option.
“I will always love America; it will always be one of my homes, but my true home is here in Israel,” she insisted.
Looking back, Armbrister says that Oct. 7 fundamentally changed her understanding of responsibility and leadership.
“I think I matured like 10 years on that day,” she says, adding that the experience altered her perception of her life, coming to believe that since God had given her a second chance, she has the responsibility to make use of it—namely, by continuing to serve in the IDF. And she has made good on that vow.
Today, she lectures in Hebrew and English as part of IDF leadership courses, the Taglit-Birthright Israel program and IDF Spokesperson’s Office delegations abroad through Friends of the IDF and other organizations. She has also committed to another eight years in the IDF: two years of university studies in crisis-and-emergency management, followed by six additional years of military service in the Home Front Command.
